I did this on a small scale in college! Back then the only way to get internet was via dialup, unless you paid $300+ a month for a DSL line (which was about 5x the speed and always on).
Since my friends and I had all just moved into a brand new apartment building together, I picked up a spool of ethernet and some ends and we literally strung the wires from window to window (wireless was far too expensive). The building was blue so I used blue wires and the owner either didn't notice or didn't care, because no one said a thing about it.
We all split the cost of the initial supplies and then everyone paid me whatever they could for the internet and I covered the rest. We had 10 people and I ended up paying about $40/mo for it personally.
On the plus side, since I controlled the gateway (and old computer the University threw out) I could do fun stuff like traffic shaping and setting up a web server to be a bulletin board for us. Also I got everyone to install one of those enterprise notification things on their Windows machines so we could send blast messages to each other about going to the city or down to the local cafe for dinner.
This is what I did in college! Ethernet cable under the carpet and along the wall for me. I had DSL piped into a Freesco Router (a floppy disk running Linux 2.0.36). I remember finally upgrading to an ethernet based ADSL modem that had the ability to flash it with router firmware. All I had to do was plug that thing into my 10baseT 3Com switch!!
We checked out a drill from the dorm office (could also get DVDs and stuff) and attempted to drill from inside of a closet into a beam that crossed the hallway. The beam seemed likely to be hollow so the idea was that then we could run a cable across and have glorious gigabit instead of the 100 Mbps that the dorm switches provided. But the exploratory drilling in the first closet was not rewarding.
I lived in the same apartment complex as some coworkers for a few years and we had a similar setup - one of our neighbors (a devops guy from work) had a high spec business comcast line and we quietly ran ethernet cables through the walls and ceilings so everyone had good internet for cheap. Great experience.
Since my friends and I had all just moved into a brand new apartment building together, I picked up a spool of ethernet and some ends and we literally strung the wires from window to window (wireless was far too expensive). The building was blue so I used blue wires and the owner either didn't notice or didn't care, because no one said a thing about it.
We all split the cost of the initial supplies and then everyone paid me whatever they could for the internet and I covered the rest. We had 10 people and I ended up paying about $40/mo for it personally.
On the plus side, since I controlled the gateway (and old computer the University threw out) I could do fun stuff like traffic shaping and setting up a web server to be a bulletin board for us. Also I got everyone to install one of those enterprise notification things on their Windows machines so we could send blast messages to each other about going to the city or down to the local cafe for dinner.
Good times.